Before the PlayStation 2 had been released, Shin'ichi Okamoto, Sony's senior
vice president of R&D, was already talking up its successor - which will
likely be introduced in 2004. "We are working to create the PlayStation
3 game machine," said Okamoto. "It will have 1,000 times the performance
of the PlayStation 2."

Yet speed won't matter if there aren't any games for the PS3. Last year's
introduction of the PS2 stumbled partly because it required new programming
skills, which limited the number of developers able to deliver games for
the launch. Mike Roberts, a computer graphics consultant, recounts some
of his colleagues "recoiling in horror" after confronting the PS2 and its
speedy but exotic parallel architecture: "The PS2 was just too alien."
This was a misstep that Microsoft is trying to exploit
by bundling its new console - which uses a standard PC-like architecture
- with a familiar PC programming interface.
(See "The Xbox," page 138.)

Sony won't make the same mistake twice. To encourage coders to ramp up
their parallel programming skills for the future, the company is already
showing off a limited-edition prototype of PlayStations to come - called
the GScube - hoping that game developers will find it irresistible. The
GScube, unveiled at Siggraph 2000, is the fastest, most flexible silicon
ever created for gameplay, and it will serve
as a training ground for the coders who'll write games for
the next PlayStation. It's designed to demonstrate what parallel programming
can do. And in the long run, Sony's
way of writing code - close to the metal, using many processors in concert
- may be the only way to get to gaming's next level, where every flying
car part in a crash will obey the laws of physics, and virtual opponents
will be motivated by near-human psychologies.

The GScube - named after the PS2's Graphics Synthesizer chip - is basically
a parallel array of 16 beefed-up PlayStations. The 16 GS chips, stocked
with several times the standard memory arsenal, are split into four
graphics-processing
blocks. Four more processors merge the graphics output from the four GPUs
and send their output to a final merger chip that cranks out an HDTV-ready
1,920 x 1,080 pixels, 16 times the resolution of today's PS2. A standard
PlayStation controller plugged into an SGI or Vaio server running Linux
controls
the whole setup. But it's the server that runs the game program, farming
out image and audio data to the individual processing units inside the
cube for rendering. (Future consumer consoles based on the concept would
compress both cube and server into a single set-top unit.)

For a kluge, the GScube looks pretty slick. The 106-pound box is designed
to fit a standard 19-inch rack, and sports a row of 21 LEDs along its top
- one wired to each of the 16 GS processors plus the five merger chips.
These glow a soothing blue at idle; during gameplay, they dance up and
down the color spectrum, according to the load being handled by the
corresponding
chip. When a light turns white, it means a processor is about to max out.

Game programmers willing to learn the ropes of GScube hacking are rewarded
with an awesome flexibility. The multiple processors give coders the option
of dividing up their games' workloads in different ways. For example, a
single frame of video could be divided into four sections, each sent to
a separate GS chip for rendering. A second group of four processors could
begin work on the frame behind it, while yet another starts on a third
frame. This approach, called triple buffering, smooths transitions between
frames to produce more realistic motion, and still leaves four processors
for sound - 16 better-than-CD-quality channels of it.

For the Siggraph debut, the high-end computer animation shops Manex Visual
Effects and Softimage built a triple-buffered game demo that rivaled Manex's
breathtaking work for The Matrix. F/x like this once took
an hour per frame to render, but the GScube does it on the fly, delivering
60 frames per second to an HDTV screen. With a top speed of more than a
billion polygons per second, GScube has the power to create photo-realistic
footage that's indistinguishable from live video.

If that's not cool enough, imagine a cube of GScubes.

Sony is already ramping up from 16 to 64 GS chips. And
the PS3 will be made even more powerful, possibly by merging the parallel
GS processors onto a superchip. (Sony has contracted the job to IBM.) But
until the chip is built, the 16-processor GScube is enough to get at least
some coders excited about sticking with Sony.